By Nava Atlas | On June 26, 2016 | Updated October 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
Say you’ve gotten a whole slew of great reviews and a tiny number of negative ones. Which ones are you most likely to remember (or more precisely, still be obsessing about) five years hence?
Of course, it’s the nasty reviews. This is actually one of the top clichés of the writing life, right up there with “write what you know.”
I never quite understood why this was until Madeleine L’Engle made it crystal clear in the passage below. It’s the negative comments that reawaken our own self-doubts, the very ones we thought we overcame once our work was in print. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 7, 2016 | Updated November 30, 2022 | Comments (4)
Who among us time-crunched wordsmiths can’t occasionally relate to L.M. Montgomery’s wistful longing for “enough spare minutes to do some writing,” as she related in her 1910 journal. Here, she muses on finding time to write, and doing so without the luxury of privacy.
She wrote this as a reflection of some years earlier when, as a young woman she needed to earn her keep before her novels (chief among them, the Anne of Green Gables series) made her famous.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 – 1942) discovered that the equation of spare time plus perfect solitude was neither practical nor feasible for her. So when she learned to snatch writing time in the midst of a hectic newspaper office, she was surprised at what she could accomplish. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On February 23, 2016 | Updated January 6, 2025 | Comments (2)
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) embodied the practice of writing as a grand passion and a path to delving deeply into the self. In this sense she foreshadowed the immediacy of today’s world of self-revelatory memoir and blogging.
Best known for her multi-volume Diary of Anaïs Nin, which became a touchstone of feminist thought, she also broke ground as a writer of female erotica, and was a splendid essayist as well. For Nin, writing was as necessary as breathing.
Of course, as her famous Diary series progressed, she became aware that she was writing not only for an audience, but for posterity. Still, her raw, honest diaries resonated with millions of women who felt she had awakened something in them. Here are some of the responses she got from readers: Read More→
By Tony Riches | On February 25, 2015 | Updated March 14, 2023 | Comments (0)
Dame Agatha Christie earned her place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist in the world with sales of over four billion books. She is also the third most widely translated author, beaten only by William Shakespeare and the Bible.
Reassuringly for anyone struggling to follow in her footsteps, after four years working on her first novel, even she was rejected by all the leading publishers of her day, before The Bodley Head press took a chance with her. Read More→
By Tony Riches | On February 25, 2015 | Updated March 9, 2023 | Comments (0)
Daphne du Maurier was born in London in May 1907 and was still writing at her death in 1989. Educated by private tutors in Paris, she published her first short stories at the age of twenty-one. Daphne du Maurier’s writing habits surely contributed to her prolific career as an author of fiction and drama.
Her publisher encouraged her to write a novel, which became The Loving Spirit in 1931. She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1952 and became a Dame of the British Empire in 1969.
In 1977 she won the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. As well as Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock directed film versions of The Birds and Rebecca. Read More→
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